Eve's Journey

Feminine Images in Hebraic Literary Tradition

Nehama Aschkenasy

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781512800111
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Théologie juive

In Eve's Journey, Nehama Aschkenasy traces the migration of several female images and feminine situations from their early appearances in Biblical writings to their incarnations in modern Hebraic literature. Focusing on the evolution of early female archetypes and prototypes, Aschkenasy uncovers the ancient roots of modern female characters and traces the changing cultural perceptions of women in Hebraic letters.The author draws on the vast body of Hebraic literary documents to illustrate how the female character is a mirror of her times as well as being a product of her creator''s imagination and conception of the woman's role in society and in fiction. The historical spectrum, provided by a discussion of Biblical narratives, Midrashic sources, documents of the Jewish mystics, Hasidic tales, and modern Hebrew works, allows an understanding of the metamorphosis that the female figure has experienced in her literary odyssey.

Five

Female Strategy

And when Boaz had eaten and drunk, and his heart was merry, he went to lie down at the end of the heap of corn; and she came softly, and uncovered his feet, and laid herself down. And it came to pass at midnight, that the man was startled, and turned over; and behold, a woman lay at his feet . . . And he said, Who art thou? . . . And she answered, I am Ruth thy handmaid; spread therefore thy skirt over thy handmaid; for thou art a near kinsman.

Ruth 3:7–9

That night I was a clockwork doll

And I turned to the right and to the left in all directions,

From Dalia Ravikovitch, “Clockwork Doll,” 1959

Women have reacted to oppression in various ways, ranging from complete acceptance of patriarchal values and resignation to a subordinate place in society, to rebellion that is sometimes external but more often is internalized and results in madness and the fragmentation of the self. The instances of outright feminine challenge to male authority, or insistent questioning, albeit respectful, of some of the patriarchal laws are rather few. The ancient documents reveal a universal feminine conduct that is timid, mild, and unassuming; after all, very few women are actually heard in the Bible and Midrash. Yet a woman’s reticence is not always acceptance; it may mean that the woman harbors feelings of hostility and anger that may erupt and find expression in various forms of behavior.

In the literature produced by men, reflecting the male writers’ conception of the world, which constitutes the bulk of the works discussed here, one has to see in every example of feminine conduct a form of feminine response. Even a passive, acquiescent stance, or a secondary, marginal role adopted by a feminine figure, which is not consciously meant by its creator to serve as an example of feminine reaction to a constricted and oppressive existence, is in itself an indication of a strategy the woman is using in an attempt to survive in a male-dominated culture. In other words, the male narrator may not even be aware that the muted presence of his female characters, which he has faithfully copied from life, may enfold in itself a statement made by women in his society, or a tactic employed by them and carried into fiction by the unsuspicious recorder of life. Thus the passive role and the silence adopted by most unnamed female characters in the Bible and Midrash should be seen both as the males’ attempts to suppress the woman’s voice, and as the woman’s own strategy of survival in a potentially crushing reality.

The majority of women in the ancient documents remain anonymous; even those who are named, like Dinah, are not always given an opportunity to express their voice. Yet those few female characters who step forward and into the limelight in the biblical texts are seen as tough, active, and vocal. Some of them use subtle “feminine” wiles, some blatant lies, and others resort to a variety of underhanded means to get what they want. In fact, most of the admirable biblical women, the matriarchs among them, are portrayed as conniving and manipulative, with a proclivity for deception and a quick-witted adjustment to difficult situations. Sarah conspires to get rid of her husband’s mistress, Hagar, and her son; Rebecca manipulates her son into fooling his father; Rachel lies to her father about the terafim that she stole from him; and Leah seems to be a willing accomplice in the tricking of Jacob.

That women were very often seen as using underhanded, dishonest means to accomplish their wishes may not necessarily reflect the male writers’ slanted view of reality or their biased conception of the female nature. It may be a true representation of realities and times when an underprivileged group had to resort to devious tactics to offset the built-in injustice in its legal and social circumstances. At the same time, treachery, falseness, or even just a circuitous manner of dealing with problems should not be seen as congenital, inherent in the feminine nature, but rather as an acquired evil, a device used by women who were very often barred from decision making, and whose opinion was rarely solicited, even in cases directly involving their own lives and fates.

Tricksters and Wise Women

The masses of anonymous women in the ancient documents come across not only as reticent and nonverbal; their seeming lack of ability to articulate and express themselves and, especially, the apparent poverty of their creative imagination are borne out by the mere fact that they did not share in the labor of creating the Judaic literary legacy. In their roles as manipulators and hoaxers, however, women are seen as great creators of fiction, as spinners of tales and producers of imagined realities. Perhaps the first case of a woman setting up a theatrical mask scene, intended to benefit her son through a case of mistaken identities, is the matriarch Rebecca.

We know Rebecca as a determined woman who takes part in her own marriage negotiations; as a young girl she “hastens” and “runs” and is seen as subtly but actively prompting Eliezer, Abraham’s messenger, to make the marriage offer to her, on behalf of his master. But when we meet her as wife and mother, she is seen, like Sarah before her, in what becomes a prototypical feminine pose: overhearing the men talk, and then pulling the strings from behind the scenes. The aging and blind Isaac tells his son Esau to prepare a feast for his father, after which the son will be blessed by the patriarch. Rebecca the mother, apparently younger and more robust than her husband, probably feels that Isaac has lost his powers of discrimination together with his sight. She will do everything in her power to put her favorite son, Jacob, in his brother’s place, so that the younger son will get the patriarch’s blessings. She devises an elaborate scheme that calls for her not only to cook a lavish meal but also to disguise her “plain” and “tent-dwelling” son in such a way that his father will mistake him for Esau, the “cunning hunter,” and the “man of the field” (Gen. 27).

In a frenzy of energetic activity, Rebecca cooks a meal, takes the best clothes of her older son and puts them on her youngest son; she then puts goats’ skins on Jacob’s smooth hands and neck, gives him the “savory food and the bread” which she prepared, and sends the apparently reluctant young man to his father. Rebecca thus helps in adding a link to the twisted, tortuous, and complicated history of her son Jacob, who from now on will either be outsmarted by others, or will have to devise strategies to outwit his enemies and, in a sense, his own fate. The biblical narrator neither condones nor condemns Rebecca’s and Jacob’s actions. He does make it clear, however, that while Rebecca was resourceful and inventive in her ability to create a make-believe situation and fool her blind husband, she was far from instrumental in the selection of Jacob as the successor of the Abrahamic mission. As Nehama Leibowitz shows in her analysis of this tale, Isaac understood the difference between his sons, and he therefore prepared a separate blessing for each of them, in accordance with their respective personalities and destinies.¹ Thus when Isaac unwittingly bestows on Jacob the blessing he designed for Esau, he promises his son material things such as abundance, fatness, and dominion; but he does not mention the Abrahamic mission, the blessing of seed and the promise of the land. Therefore, when the ruse is discovered, Isaac not only has to bless his son Esau, but he sees fit to bless his son Jacob again, this time giving him the promise of the land and charging him with upholding the Abrahamic mission (Gen. 28: 34). It turns out that though Isaac’s sight is gone, his mental abilities are intact, and he knows very well which of his sons should become the third patriarch.

Subtly and indirectly, then, the biblical narrator lets us know that Rebecca’s elaborate scheme was completely unnecessary, and that her energy and talents were wasted on a ruse that only complicated her and her son’s lives. Rebecca is punished for interfering in what was conceived of as the patriarch’s domain and his prerogative, that is, mapping out the future of his sons, for she now has to send her beloved son abroad, away from his brother’s vengeful hand. It also becomes clear that though Isaac loved his wife very much, he did not share with her his opinion of his sons and his plans for them; ignorant of Isaac’s state of mind, and not trusting his judgment, Rebecca decides to take matters into her own hands. Thus Rebecca the matriarch emerges as a woman discontent with her derivative status, who is confident of her wisdom and adamant about asserting her influence, and whose sense of powerlessness leads her to using wiles and trickery that, ironically, lead only to disaster. At the same time, Rebecca’s unused talents and energies are unraveled before the reader, who is forced to draw conclusions about all those feminine abilities and gifts that were laid to waste in ancient times.

Another woman who takes part in a duplicitous scheme that again involves imposture and impersonation is Leah, who marries Jacob by pretending to be Rachel, her sister. Unlike in the previous case, the trick is not initiated by the woman but rather by her father, the devious Laban. But it is evident that Leah is a willing accomplice; she must know the art of dissembling if she is able to convince the lovesick Jacob, throughout the entire ceremony and wedding night, that she is indeed his beloved Rachel. As we know, the deception of Isaac and the deception of Jacob are causally connected and mirror each other; Jacob’s deception at the hand of Leah constitutes “poetic justice” in correlation to the earlier episode; it stands as punishment to Jacob: from the deceiver he turns into the deceived, and the punishment fits the crime.²

Leah’s presence, however, remains nonvocal; while the biblical narrator explains what led Rebecca to devise the scheme—her disaffection with Esau’s Canaanite wives and Isaac’s blindness—he does not elaborate on Leah’s motives for forcing herself on an unwilling and unloving groom. The Midrash tells us that Leah was afraid that, as the older daughter, she will have to marry her older cousin, Esau. The Midrash also dramatizes the wedding night and describes how Jacob did not take the hints of the local people that he was being duped. It also enlarges Leah’s part in the trick by having her answer to the name “Rachel” several times during the wedding night.³ Yet the biblical text itself, through its spare, lean prose, allows the reader to fill in the missing gaps. Let us look at Leah’s predicament from the woman’s point of view. Here is the firstborn daughter in a family headed by an authoritarian paterfamilias. As a woman, she is powerless and lacks any control over her own life and destiny. At the same time, she has some rights that are protected and enforced by her society, one of which is the assurance that she will be the first one of her father’s daughters to be married. Jacob’s appearance in her life naturally raises hopes that are soon crushed when, like everyone else, she learns that “Jacob loved Rachel.” It is apparently common knowledge that Jacob’s ways are unorthodox and that he believes that the biological firstborn is not necessarily the one who should enjoy extra privileges; Jacob is also known to regard the status of the firstborn as transferable (he “bought” his own from his older brother). Both Laban and Leah are, therefore, prepared to set Jacob straight. When Laban tells Jacob, after the deception is discovered, that “it must not be so done in our country, to give the younger before the firstborn,” he speaks also for his daughter Leah. In other words, Leah was fully within her rights when she tricked Jacob; the latter should have realized that the first wedding to be held in Laban’s house would be that of the oldest daughter, Leah.

Both Rebecca and Leah are seen as entering into a complicated scheme that involves pretense, make-believe, and playacting. Leah, like Rebecca, is eventually punished; for, no matter how just she was in insisting on her birthright, she will never be loved by her reluctant husband, and will always suffer rejection and humiliation. In both cases the powerless woman creates an illusory world as a way of attempting to change reality and mold it to her own liking. Rebecca’s action constitutes defiance of patriarchal authority and confidence that the woman knows better. In Leah’s case, however, the rebellion is not against the status quo but, rather, against the unorthodox ideas of freedom of choice in matters of the heart, introduced by the newcomer Jacob, that seem to threaten the daughter in the patriarchal structure and deprive her of those few rights that she enjoys within her constrained existence. Defiance of male authority, exhibited by Rebecca, and enforcement of the patriarchal tenets, exhibited by Leah—as different and polarized as these two attitudes seem to be—both stem from the women’s innate feeling of powerlessness coupled with a strong will and faith in their ability to defeat the man, if only through duplicity and dishonesty.

But women manipulate events and create new realities not only through subversive means. The story of Deborah the Judge (Judg. 4–5) manifests how a charismatic woman is instrumental in boosting the morale of her people, and in urging the discouraged chief of staff to round up his army and go out to war, thus averting the military and political disaster that was threatening the Israelites. In fact, the tale that centers around the war between the Israelites and the Canaanites in Deborah’s time is significant in that, though apparently a “male” story that describes a battle and a military victory, it is actually a “female” story. It starts with Deborah the Judge serving as military advisor to the head of the Israelite army, climaxes in the suspenseful scene where another woman, Jael, kills the formidable enemy, Sisera, and ends with Deborah envisioning the Canaanite mother of Sisera, surrounded by her “wise women,” anxiously awaiting the arrival of her victorious son from the battlefield. The three women display three distinctly different feminine tactics that become prototypical feminine responses to a male-dominated environment and reappear in later literature.

Deborah is first introduced to the reader as “a prophetess” and “the wife of Lappidot”; thus, if the first title implies acceptance of woman as spiritual leader and an authority figure, the second immediately reinforces patriarchy: a married woman is identified through her husband. However, some of the Midrash sages read the phrase ’eshet lappidot as ‘woman of fire,’ analogous to ’eshet ḥayil, ‘woman of valor’ in Proverbs—a comment on the woman’s mettle rather than on her subordinate status.⁴ Deborah is further described not only as prophetess, a spiritual leader, but as judge, a social and legal authority. But it is with the power of her language that she initiates events and makes things happen. The people of Israel have been oppressed at the hands of Sisera for twenty years, yet only Deborah has the courage and stamina to suggest military action. She summons Baraq and commands him, in God’s name, to recruit ten thousand people and challenge Sisera, pronouncing to him the divine promise that Sisera will be delivered to his hands. Baraq stipulates that she come with him, to which Deborah retorts with “I will surely go with thee; however, thou shalt scarcely attain honor on the journey that thou goest, for the Lord will yield Sisera into the hands of a woman” (Judg. 4:9).

Deborah’s answer may imply acquiescence to the patriarchal tenets of male supremacy and an attempt on the woman’s part to protect the man’s position, even if it means minimizing her real power. She warns Baraq that if she comes with him, his eventual victory will be attributed to her, rather than to him. If this reading is corr...